


Happy Accidents

by eleutheria_has_won



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, I love kidfic so much you have no idea, Kidfic, M/M, The Author Regrets Everything, The Author Regrets Nothing, This was supposed to be a few thousand words, how did this happen, johnkat - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-03
Updated: 2014-06-03
Packaged: 2018-02-03 07:09:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1735685
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eleutheria_has_won/pseuds/eleutheria_has_won
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The story of how John Egbert and Karkat Vantas accidentally on-purpose became parents is long, complicated, and a source of great amusement for all involved. (Except, perhaps, John Egbert and Karkat Vantas.) </p>
<p>also known as: In Which A Troll and Human Inter-species Couple Are Instructed By The Human's Bizarre Mammalian Relative To Adopt A Puppy Of The German Shepherd Variety But Instead Accidentally Offer To Foster A Mutant Grub Via Their Jadeblooded Childhood Friend And Consequently Experience Numerous Shenanigans Surrounding Their New Found Parenthood, Up To And Including: Thunderstorms, An Inability To Play Well With Others, A Regrettable Forgetfulness Regarding Telekinetics, A Neighbor's Matesprit's Small Dog, Food Poisoning, A Series Of Revelations Concerning Parenthood, And At Least 23 Different Occasions Of Loosing Her In Public Places.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Happy Accidents

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lacygentlywaftingcurtains](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=lacygentlywaftingcurtains), [WeHaveNone](https://archiveofourown.org/users/WeHaveNone/gifts).



Though it wouldn’t be until years later that they would really sit down and figure it all out from the start, the whole thing really, truly began the day that they went down to visit the girls in Fresno.

The girls, in this particular instance, consisted of one Jade Harley - John’s “rather” eccentric cousin with a passion for science that “bordered on fetishistic” (Karkat’s words, not John’s) - one Kanaya Maryam - Karkat’s jadeblooded ex-moirail, with whom he maintained a soap opera based bromance - and one Rose Lalonde - said jadeblood’s snarky psychoanalyst of a girlfriend, and childhood friend of both Jade and John. A few years ago, via the various shenanigans that tended to characterize their somewhat…odd group of compatriots, the three girls had come together, become friends, and decided to move to a new city as a group. Though the choosing process had been fraught with difficulty (and no small amount of alcohol), eventually, Fresno was decided upon. It had a decent liberal arts college for Rose, who studied psychology and writing and had a vested interest in analyzing the hell out of all around her; it had a technical institute for Jade, who studied physics in between her attempts to learn non-canine socialization, and volunteered at a local animal shelter in between that; and it had a local chapter of the Auxilliatrices of the Caverns for Kanaya, who was of the age when jadebloods began their internships with the Mother Grub to prepare for their sacred role in troll reproduction.

John and Karkat, who lived a mere 13 hours and two states north of them in Seattle, had congratulated them on the move in their own special ways (“Congrats, you guys!” “Now just don’t fuck it up, though God help us, we all know Harley’s bound to wreck some shit and chew some shoes.” “Hey!”). However, for all that they remained close via chat and the occasional Skype call, in all the time that the girls had lived in Fresno, (two years) the boys had yet to make the trip down to actually see them.

Then Rose had won some kind of award in a local writing contest - “Nothing very important, I assure you. A minor award at best,” she had said in a smug voice that assured them it was just the opposite - and it was important enough that Jade had absolutely insisted that John and Karkat make the trip down. Karkat had snarled, and John had laughed, but in the end, they did it. The ceremony was nice, if terrifyingly boring. Afterwards, however, they all returned back to the girls’ apartment for a rousing evening of “gossip.”

(For reference, “gossip” did include a large amount of actual gossip; the key factor that turned gossip into “gossip” was the blood-alcohol content of the participants.)

It was somewhere at the midpoint of the night that the fateful conversation began. Karkat had reached the magical point when he got as angry and shouty as alcohol could possibly make him and then tipped straight over the edge into being the cuddliest drunk one could hope for. As such, Karkat was sitting on John’s lap and doing a remarkable impression of a slightly weepy octopus. (Jade was cooing, but hey, they’d been dating for what - five years then? John could handle a few “awwws” without blushing. (Okay, no he couldn’t, but it was only a little blush, seriously!)) The topic had meandered from their friends and their various “shenani-bullshit-igans” (Karkat, again, mildly drunk.) onto what was going on with their various jobs, classes, and hobbies. Jade was talking about a pregnant German Shepherd mix that they’d picked up the other day and when the puppies were due (“You guys should totally get one!” “Harley, you… are more than enough dog in one… troll’s life.” “Ruude!!”), which had reminded Kanaya of the newest clutch of eggs which she had been given the responsibility of tending.

"Most of them sh..seem at this juncture to be healthy," Kanaya had mused elegantly, pretending very hard not to notice the healthy jade-colored flush in her own cheeks. "There is the usual ratio one would expect in regards to color." Here she’d paused. "Though we have noticed a particular cerulean which seems a bit…warm for its color." Then she waved a dismissive hand and almost fell off her chair in doing so.

And that was the end of the matter. Jade returned to squealing about the impending puppies, and by the end of the night, Karkat and John were half-convinced that they should be going out and buying dog stuff for their future canine companion. Of course, once they woke up in the morning - and after the worst of their hangovers had worn off - they discussed the idea in the kind of exacting detail one expected of these two particular twenty-somethings.

"So, are we really getting a dog?"

"Fuck, no, John. I was drunk. You can’t just take what I say when I’m drunk at face value. What would we even do with a dog, we’d be shit at being dog parents."

"Heh heh, whatever you say, darling."

"Don’t talk to me."

"If I shouldn’t talk to you, does that mean you don’t want the hangover pills?"

"John, I love you more than life itself. You’re the moon in my sky. If I do not get an Alka-Seltzer in the next thirty seconds, so help me, I am going to _die_."

"Nice rhyme!"

"Fuck you."

Of course, Jade still adored the idea one hundred percent. (Rose didn’t like dogs. Kanaya was mostly ambivalent.) So, of course, it didn’t end there. Over the next few months, even after the two returned to Seattle, they got update after update from Jade on the state of the mother dog and, two months later, the litter of German Shepherd puppies she’d had. It became sort of a fixed point in their lives, a happy (if slightly exasperating) little ritual - wake up, drink coffee, read the half-dozen new Facebook messages and pictures of puppies they’d gotten from Jade the previous evening. They started joking about getting one of the puppies, until they started talking about it half-seriously.

Then Kanaya sent Karkat a request for a video chat one evening after work, sometime in mid-September, approximately five months after that first conversation.

When Karkat answered the request, Kanaya had slightly tear-smeared mascara and a glass of wine in her hand, which would have probably been less bizarre if she hadn’t been chugging the wine in particularly uncultured fashion.

"What the fuck, Kanaya," Karkat said once he’d picked his jaw up off the floor. "Shit, is something wrong? Is someone hurt?"

"Karkat," Kanaya slurred. And then the whole story had come pouring.

The cerulean egg which had been a bit too warm had turned out to be a mutant, as Kanaya and the other caretakers had feared. The grub that had emerged had too many eyes, blood a few shades too close to pastel, a body temperature degrees higher than any coldblood’s, and a weak version of a lowblood’s telekinesis. While that in itself wasn’t a death sentence - it had been thousands of years since the Alternian Empire and its “culling” methodology were a thing that existed - these things were now left up to the lusii; the survivors were simply those who got picked. The grub was just “wrong” enough in color that though all the rest of her clutch-mates had been taken by one lusus or another, she had yet to be picked, and had been completely ignored by every cerulean lusus there. There was simply no lusus with a color quite like hers, and if nothing was done, the grub would die of neglect. It was only two months old.

Karkat listened to all this, while Kanaya sobbed, though some part of him was flinching in horrified recognition. (He’d been so, so lucky - one in a million chance, that a grub and a lusus with the same mutation would exist in a generation - so, so lucky.) Kanaya had a busy life, a job, two flatmates, and an apartment that held the three of them and not much more. She had neither the time nor the space to care for a grub, no matter how much she wanted to. She’d been feeding the grub secretly, even though the older Auxilliatrices frowned on it deeply, but it was still getting thinner and weaker every day.

Karkat had talked Kanaya down until Rose showed up to put her weepy, semi-drunk girlfriend to bed, then closed the computer and spent a good hour sitting in silence, thinking. He was still there when John returned home, late into the evening as usual for two out of three nights. (John worked an evening shift at a local bookstore, in between giving piano lessons; Karkat wrote TV and book reviews for a local newspaper.) He gave Karkat a curious look, but let him be; it wasn't until after dinner that Karkat took John’s hands, sat him down, and explained the situation in detail.

Then he asked for a favor.

John told him that if he thought something like that was a favor, then he might have had his priorities - or rather, his idea of John’s priorities - a bit screwed up.

"And hey," John said, "how much worse can it be than a German shepherd puppy?"

"Much worse. At least it’s only until Kanaya can find a proper lusus for her," Karkat said grimly, then sighed and let his head fall to John’s shoulder. "Thank you," he whispered. John hugged him close and smiled against his horn.

"Hey, Karkat," he said. "I know it’s a bit late, but… wanna be temporary lusus-dads together?"

And that, of all things, had been enough to make Karkat smile.

The next day, they had messaged Kanaya and told her their agreement. She’d been over the moon. After a little haggling, they agreed that Karkat would fly down to Fresno to pick up the grub and receive last minute instructions from Kanaya, while John would stay home and prepare the house for a small, energetic, and fast-moving creature with sharp teeth and a propensity for eating everything it could get its jaws around.

"Sounds a little like a puppy," John had said in good humor.

"God help us," Karkat muttered by way of reply.

The flight took about an hour; not too long, but still plenty of time for Karkat to worry and stress and halfway talk himself out of it and then mentally scream and swear at himself until he was almost convinced again. Jade met him at the airport, giving him a hug that set him growling out invective, but she got down to business in a heartbeat.

"I’ll drive you to the Caverns," she said, "I have a small dog crate and some of the other stuff Kanaya said you might need in the back, so once she gives you the low-down you can be back in time for your flight home tonight."

The drive was only twenty minutes, and Jade spent most of it annoying the living hell out of him. (If he didn’t know better, Karkat would have sworn that she was black-flirting with him just for fun sometimes.) This turned out to be for the best, luckily, because by the time they got there Karkat had all but forgotten his jitters. He strode into the administration buildings confidently, directed by a yellow-blooded secretary to the room reserved by one Trainee Maryam. The nervousness didn’t return until he stepped into one of the front building’s pleasant interview rooms and saw Kanaya for the first time in months, standing there with an enormous blanket-covered wicker basket in her arms.

"Her name is Shakti," Kanaya said without delay, "She is weak right now, so she should not be too much of a handful to begin with."

"I..." Karkat gaped for a moment. Then he realized what he was doing and forced his face into a more appropriate scowl. "...hope you realize how fucking enormous this goddamn favor I'm doing you is, Kanaya. Seriously. Me and John are up to our fucking eyes in work and shit, you fucking owe us for this."

"John and I," she said serenely. Then she did smile, and continued in a soft voice, "I understand. Thank you very much, Karkat."

"You're fucking welcome," he grumbled. They stood in silence for a minute. (Quiet enough that he could hear the little rustling sounds coming from the basket.) "...so. Shakti?"

"Indeed," Kanaya agreed with a smile (which was almost a smirk.) "She'll need to be fed every few hours, and to be limited to her own body weight per meal at most. If left without restriction she will happily eat until her stomach explodes. She can eat anything, but food that is rich in protein or fat would be best. Calcium is important as well. I have a formula mix for the first week or so which will help her to build her strength up again..."

After that, Karkat didn't hear very much, because Kanaya had been steadily walking toward him the entire time, and she had just unloaded the entire basket straight into Karkat's arms without so much as a "here, take this."

The blanket was nice, he registered inanely. Fluffy and pale blue - he could only assume it was the correct shade.

There was movement underneath.

"...but once she recovers, you'll have to be sure to have plenty of toys for mental stimulation...you are not paying attention to me at all, are you."

"What?" Karkat said distractedly, "No, no, fuck that, I'm paying attention." He just... couldn't stop staring at that blanket.

Kanaya did the Kanaya version of a snicker, which was to put a hand up to hide her smirk. "Just look inside the basket Karkat," she sighed, "I swear, she is too weak to bite at the moment." A pause. "You might want to be careful of that later."

"Does it look like I have hands free at the moment?" Karkat growled at her, tearing his eyes away to glare, but it didn't stop Kanaya from approaching and sticking her hand into his biting range so that she could pull back the blanket for him. And there it was, curled into a little "u" shape in a nest of old, ratty towels. There she was.

So the blanket does match, was his first thought. She's so tiny, was his second. How the fuck does a thing like that turn into a troll?! was his third.

She was pretty tiny, and considerably un-troll-like in appearance: a little curl of pale sky blue with little black commas for legs and capped at one end by hair more resembling a small black pom pom than anything else. Karkat couldn't see her face or horns, from how she was curled up in the towels. She was maybe as long as the distance from his elbow to wrist, if she stretched.

"Does she even have a sign?" he asked after a moment.

Kanaya nodded and said, "It's a cerulean sign, but yes, she was close enough that she does,"

"Good," Karkat said flatly, "So how soon do you think you'll be able to find an actual goddamn lusus for this thing?"

"Some of the older jadebloods claim that this variation is more commonly seen in some of the Alaskan chapters," Kanaya cautioned, "The search might take a few months or so."

Karkat snorted, "Fuck, whatever. It's not like we were expecting it to take a week or something. We'll be good."

"I am glad to hear that," Kanaya said solemnly. "Do you require assistance getting back to Jade's car?"

"Not unless she's been secretly converted by you flighty broads and forgot to wait," Karkat growled. Kanaya smiled, then glanced down.

"Ah."

"Ah, what?" Karkat snapped. "Anything in particular you'd like to tell the audience."

"She is waking up."

Karkat jumped, then looked down at the basket. Sure enough, the little blue squiggle was starting to move around, and after a moment, a small grey face and a pair of orange-yellow horns emerged. Three little eyes blinked up at him, out of tandem, in sleepy bewilderment. (He thought he felt his heart stop a little.) Then the grub - Shakti - yawned squeakily, flashing a delicate arrangement of needle-like baby teeth while she did, and turned away to burrow back into the towel nest and go to sleep again.

"I dosed her with a very mild sedative earlier," Kanaya commented after minute. "She should sleep through the night and wake sometime tomorrow morning. Jade has a crate for you to take her on the flight in?"

"Uh...yeah," Karkat said.

Kanaya nodded firmly. "Then we should be fine." And she pulled the blanket back to cover the basket.

Kanaya's word was good, at least. The grub slept peacefully through having her blanket towel bundle scooped out of the basket and put into the size-small dog crate for transport. (The basket was returned to the secretary, who huffed and told them to get lost. Karkat would have been more offended, but he could see from the reflection in the guy's glasses that he was watching Troll Housewives, and if there was anything Karkat respected in this world, it was soap-opera-watching time.)

The flight back home was peaceful enough, as was the taxi ride home from the airport. John welcomed him home with a smile and a kiss that went on a little longer than was precisely intended.

When they... detached, John grinned at him. "So I got the apartment about as grub proof as I think it'll go," he said quietly. "All the breakable things away or up really high on things she can't climb, those plastic cover thingies in the electrical sockets so she can't zap herself, cords put away so she can't chew on them or get them around her neck, so on, so forth. Can I see?"

"Mnh," Karkat mumbled into his shoulder. "Sure. Go ahead. I'll take the shitload of stuff they gave us into the kitchen."

"Sounds good," John said, leaning back until Karkat found his feet and could get the energy to pick up the bags again. When he returned, he found John sitting cross-legged on the floor with the bundle of blankets in his lap.

“She's so little,” John whispered in fascination, his fingertips hovering over her like he wasn't sure if he could touch without breaking her. “Was she any trouble on the trip back?”

Karkat dropped down onto the floor beside him. “Nah, Kanaya dosed her with something before I got there,” he grumbled (quietly, though he'd deny it.) “Said she wasn't going to wake up until tomorrow morning.”

John nodded absently. “What's her name? Does she have one?”

“Shakti, apparently,” Karkat said. “No symbol name, though, even though she has a symbol.”

John glanced at him in surprise. “I thought mutants generally didn't have symbols?”

Karkat frowned. “She does, apparently. Somehow, the jadebloods decided she was close enough to cerulean to have one of theirs, but not close enough that she could have the name that went with it. Fucking assholes.”

John snickered once or twice; they drifted in a companionable silence.

“Look at her little eye,” John whispered after a moment, tracing the very tip of his finger around it. Karkat, too tired to make a fuss out of anything at the moment, obligingly looked. Two of her eyes were the usual size, set in the usual spots, but the third was smaller and set above and just behind the outer corner of the left eye. When open, they were a fairly pretty pastel blue, but closed as they were, they just look like small black parentheses. “It's like a little decoration.”

Karkat snorted. “Only you, Egbert. Whatever. We should get to bed, you have work tomorrow, and so do I.”

“Well, you work from home,” John yawned, carefully putting the blankets (plus grub) back in the dog crate and closing it tight. Karkat got slowly to his feet, feeling the exhaustion in every limb. “Does that even count? It's not like you need to get up early.”

“Fuck you, it does so count,” Karkat growled without feeling, giving John a hand to his feet and putting the crate on the couch as he passed it.

Later, just as Karkat was on the edge of sleep, John laughed softly from the other side of their bed. “Man,” he said, “this is not going to be anything like a German Shepherd, is it?”

Karkat made a sound that could have, in some loose interpretations, qualified as a laugh. “No, really?”

The next morning, John left for his first client of the day (a student he kept gushing about who “showed real promise, Karkat!”) (To which Karkat would reply, “She’s nine, you massive dork.”) and Karkat stayed at home with his laptop and a recording of the next episode of the show he was reviewing. He was sitting on the couch and had gotten halfway through the episode when he heard a muffled rustling from the cage at his side. When he glanced over, there was a little grey face at the thin bars of the door, staring out blearily with half-lidded blue eyes.

“Rise and shine, lazy bones. About time you got your ass up,” Karkat said quietly. The grub - Shakti, he reminded himself, it - _she_ \- had a name - jumped and took a moment to zero in on his voice. She stared at him for a moment, obviously perplexed, then turned her trio of eyes on the television screen and the (frankly atrocious) soap opera still playing on it. Karkat grimaced at the reminder; the show was, put mildly, an affront to cinema, soap operas, and the sensibilities of anyone with a brain, and the only good part of the entire operation was going to be getting to write the truly abominable review the thing deserved. To his surprise, however, he wasn’t the only one who thought the show was fucking deplorable. When he glanced back at Shakti, her face was screwed up in a bizarre expression that could only be described as utter disgust. Karkat had no idea if she was just copying him or what, but it was enough that he laughed from sheer surprise. “Yeah. Me, too, kiddo,” he snorted. “The horrors I subject myself to for a salary, you have no idea the shit I’ve seen.”

Clearly, she did not think very highly of this, for Shakti just made a little huff sound and disappeared back into her burrow for whatever mysterious things grubs did in a dog crate full of blankets and old towels. Karkat snorted and got back to his show.

Not very friendly at the moment? Oh, well. Fine by Karkat. At least it reminded him to feed her once the show was done.

Tired and wary as the grub was, Karkat didn’t so much as glimpse her when he set the cage down on the living room floor and opened the door. However, the moment he set down the dish of the catfood-looking stuff that Kanaya had given them in front of the open door, the blankets twitched once, twice, and a small blue blur stumbled out before Karkat had gotten more than two feet away. It took her a minute to get to the dish, but once she was there, Shakti set into it with a will. She gave Karkat the evil eye (or three evil eyes) while she ate, but that didn’t stop her from inhaling the food at record speed. Karkat grimaced at the mess she was making - speed did not necessarily mean clean - until he remembered Kanaya talking about how the grub at been slowly starving in caverns stripped bare by her clutch and no lusus to provide anything else, and grimaced more deeply at the uncomfortable tightness in his chest.

He gave her a second serving.

When she was done, Shakti went back into her cage, albeit even more slowly than she’d left it. The rest of the day fell into a pretty comfortable pattern; write the review, feed the grub, write again, feed her again, eat lunch, read over first draft, feed grub, finish editing first draft, feed grub, send final draft to the paper, unload the dishwasher like he’d been meaning to do, make dinner, eat dinner, and finally, feed the grud yet again. By the time the day was half over, Karkat had stopped feeling sorry for her (okay, no, he hadn’t, but he was feeding her so he could ignore it) and had started just being amazed how much the damn thing could put away.

In between meals, though, she spent a large portion of the day quiet, sleeping, or some combination therein, just like Kanaya had said she would. He heard her moving about from time to time, but nothing big or loud, and she never made many noises beyond a huff besides that; given that most grubs were obnoxiously hyperactive perpetual noise machines, this more than anything told him how weak she was. It made for a quiet house. John wasn’t back until about eight, just after the grub had eaten for the last time and hidden herself back in her blankets again, and he spent at least twenty minutes that first night trying to coax her out to say hello; the most he got was a glimpse of pale blue before she curled up and hid again.

Other than that? You could barely tell that the grub was there. Their days fell into an easy pattern, barely different at all from their lives before. The only differences were the dog crate full of blankets which sat in a corner of the living room, the cans of the special grub food in the cabinets, the litter box in the laundry room, and the need to remember to put food out on a regular basis.

The pattern had lasted maybe a week. It was the weekend again, and John and Karkat had finally gotten enough time to themselves to sit down together and watch a movie. (Karkat had spent twenty minutes arguing John down from a “nostalgic” Cage flick. It was fair, though, because John had spent a half an hour arguing Karkat down from a romantic comedy.) They were almost ten minutes in (and already beginning to ignore the movie in favor of rediscovering each other’s tonsils) when John caught a glimpse of something moving out of the corner of his eye. Something small, low to the ground, and rather interestingly blue.

“Hey,” he gasped when they broke apart, “check it out. Is that what I think it is?”

“What?” Karkat said, a little wild-eyed, “The fuck are you talking about? Why the fuck are we talking?” he muttered to himself.

“No, no, look!” John laughed quietly, excited. Karkat rolled his eyes and groaned softly in annoyance, but turned around all the same. Once he did, though, John could see his eyes widen in amazement.  

Peeking around the bottom corner of the couch, Shakti looked both very small and more alive than they’d seen her look since she had arrived. She didn’t seem afraid of them, but she was definitely watching them.

“I guess you forgot to close the door after you fed her,” Karkat muttered, “You dumbass.” John chuckled, a little breathless.

“ _Look at her_ , Karkat!” he said.

“I _am_ , asshole,” Karkat snapped.

“ _Look!_ ”

“I’m _looking_.”

“Karkat!”

“Fuck, why are you so _excited_ by this-”

“Why are you _not_ excited?”

“-so the fucking thing is out and about finally, it’s not that exciting-”

“-no swearing in front of the baby, Karkat-”

In all of this (during which the couple was distracted by their second favorite/most common couple activity, bickering) (the first was snogging the living daylights out of one another) Shakti’s eyes had slowly been narrowing. All at once, the little grub lifted her head and made a demanding “peep!” so loud, it silenced both of her new caretakers. Karkat and John stared at her, bewildered.

Then she turned on a dime and scuttled away. John and Karkat turned to look at each other, eyes very wide. John started snickering. Karkat made a bizarre sound that sounded very much a swallowed giggle.

And that was it for them. They simply could not go back to kissing. They were much too busy laughing for it.

After that, things began to change, little by little. Karkat still read his books or watched his shows to write articles on during the day, but sometimes, he had a tiny companion sitting next to him, napping or watching the screen or making little noises. She was still quiet, far more than grubs usually were, but now if someone got close while she was eating she would make an angry chittering noise, and if she was hungry she would peek out of her nest and make steadily more authoritarian squeaking until John or Karkat (usually Karkat) rolled their eyes and got up to feed her. And that was just where it started.

As the days and weeks went by, Shakti got more and more energetic. She grew slowly, but surely. With her energy returning, Shakti's personality began to shine through in ways that John found adorable (if slightly obnoxious) and Karkat found obnoxious (if slightly adorable.) In the second week, they learned that she disliked the sound of the washer, the dryer, and the microwave, but simply could not get enough of the vacuum, and if given the chance would run after it squeaking incessantly until whoever was using it slowed down enough for her to climb on top of it and purr. Two days later, they learned that if they left laundry on the floor for any duration of time, they would have to be very careful about picking it up again, especially if they hadn't seen Shakti for a while, because she liked to crawl inside an abandoned pants leg or sock and take naps. She found birds outside the window to be fascinating and would stare for hours at the bird feeder on a neighbor's balcony. She would give bacon, if offered to her, a very skeptical sniff, but instantly devoured blueberries. (When this happened, John swore and Karkat gave him the most intensely superior look he had seen since Rose's cat actually got a canary; their longstanding debate over the relative deliciousness vs. disgustingness of blueberries has existed since high school and was a matter of legend among friends and enemies alike.) Sometime in the fourth week, Kanaya called and asked them if they had gotten her those mental stimulation toys yet, and Karkat answered "of fucking course, Kanaya, who do you think we fucking are, bad foster lusii" while frantically gesturing at John to go get those toys right this second. John came back with a weird feather thing with a bell in it and a set of blocks that were apparently good for babies to chew on and probably wouldn't shred under Shakti's baby teeth, which tended to be a might sharper than human babies'.

In fact, in all of this, John found himself thinking of Shakti more as a particularly bizarre pet than a baby troll. It wasn't hard to do - she was just self-sufficient enough that the level of effort required more resembled the former than the latter, and she didn't act much like a baby. He tried his best, but it wasn't until the first day of the fifth week - the one month anniversary of Shakti's arrival - that he really got the difference.

They had been in the middle of a dry spell (well, for Seattle, which meant it still wasn’t overly dry) when they had brought Shakti home, and the dry spell had lasted well into that first month. It wasn't until she’d been there just under a month that storm clouds began to really gather around mid-morning for what was obviously going to be one hell of a storm.

In light of this, and of the weather reports confirming what anyone who stuck their head outside could see, John had canceled all his lessons for the day, not willing to risk getting caught in the rain and unable to get home, and Karkat had decided (in all his worrywart glory) to make a last minute essentials run to the grocery store. When the first drops of rain started to fall, John was relaxing on the couch, flipping through the latest sample of Rose's work (she was starting to talk about publishing some of her stuff, and John had offered to read over it for her (actually, he told her that he was sure she'd do great, which apparently amounted to the same thing with Rose)) and Shakti was scuffling about with one of her blocks on the floor in front of the TV. When the rain really started pouring down, John noticed, and worried for Karkat, but he wasn't overly concerned. It wasn't quite as bad as it could be yet.

It wasn't until the first sharp crack of thunder that he realized that Shakti, having lived a majority of her life underground, has probably never experienced a thunderstorm before. When the rain had first come down, she'd stopped playing long enough to stare at the windows in mild confusion, obviously bewildered by the weird noise. The thunder, however, was another story altogether.

A split second after the crash, John had most of the wind knocked out of him by the high-speed impact of a small blue blur to his sternum. After a few moments, he got his breath back, but it wasn’t until he could breathe normally that he realized that the high pitched whine he kept hearing was not, in fact, the ringing in his ears, nor was the pressure on his chest just the inability to breathe. Shakti was clamped onto the front of his hoodie with all six of her little legs, burying her face against John’s chest and shaking.

“Oh, uh...hey there!” John said, not quite sure what to do or what was going on. Another peal of thunder outside the window, so close he could feel it shake the house a little, cleared it right up for him. Shakti wailed into the fabric of the hoodie and pressed closer. (John hadn’t thought there was closer to be had, but she managed.)

“Oh, no...” he said, moving his book to the side. “Are you scared of the thunder, Shakti? I’m sorry, sweetie, I can’t...” Whatever he might have said, he didn’t get the chance to finish it.

Shakti lifted up her face to look at him, just long enough for him to see to her expression. The terror and misery was so obvious that John felt his heart flinch. Her eyes were already wet with blue-tinted tears. She made a pleading sound, somewhere between a whine and a mewl; the message couldn’t have been more clear if she’d actually said “make it stop.” Thunder sounded again, so loud and close the windows rattled, and she squeezed her eyes shut, ducked her head back down, and started crying piteously. John could feel her trembling against him.

“Oh,” John breathed, wrapping his arms around her almost without thinking. “ _Shhh_ , no, _hey_ , hey, it’s okay, it’s okay, don’t cry...” The next peal of thunder made her scream, and John reacted, curling around her tightly, tucking her head under his chin. “It’s okay, it’s okay, baby girl, _shhh_ , shhh, it’s just thunder, it can’t hurt you, shhh, come here...” Shakti just sobbed.

John never did remember the exact details of the next hour or so. He knew that he sat there the entire time, rocking back and forth, whispering comfort, and that with every new rumble Shakti had started crying all over again. He knew that Karkat hadn’t come home until after dark, having gotten stuck in traffic caused by an accident from the storm, and that even Karkat hadn’t been able to calm her down, only huddle close and offer what comfort he could. And John knew that he had never felt quite so helpless in his life.

Eventually, Shakti had become so exhausted that she fell asleep, even if she jolted awake again and started whimpering every time there was thunder loud enough. It wasn’t necessarily any better, but it was at least enough of a break that John could tell Karkat what had happened and get some food - he’d missed dinner, and so had Shakti. It was late by then, so they’d tried to put her in her nest and get to bed, but within ten minutes there was sobbing just outside the room and scratching on the bedroom door, so they ended up letting her in. Shakti spent the night curled in between them.

Despite how exhausted he was, John found he couldn’t sleep that night. Something about Shakti’s reaction to the storm was...bugging him wasn’t the right word. It was making him think. It wasn’t her fear, though. When he thought about how terrified she’d been, his heart twisted painfully. Without conscious thought, he pulled the grub closer against his side. (For her part, Shakti didn’t seem to mind; she let out a sleepy chirr and burrowed in, then went back to sleep.) It was when he thought about how she’d immediately gone to him that something in the back of his head started nagging at it. He didn’t understand it until the next morning, when he was setting out breakfast for her (on the kitchen counter next to his, because she’d refused to get further than arm's reach from either Karkat or him).

A pet, when terrified, was just an animal; it ran and hid from whatever scared it. A terrified child, however, would bolt to her parents for comfort in her fear, and stay with them until she wasn’t scared anymore.

Shakti had done the latter.

“Holy shit,” John whispered to himself, his eyes very, very wide. “I’m a _dad_.”

(When he’d repeated this later to Rose, in a much louder and more panicky voice, she’d raised a single eyebrow and said “I assume you are referring to Shakti?” He’d just nodded, a little unable to process. Rose had rolled her eyes then. “John, I love you as a brother, but you are raising a child with your devoted life partner. I have no idea how you didn’t realize this earlier.” John had no idea why he thought she would helpful in the first place.)

Life opened up in new ways after that. John started taking pictures of the little grub and pinning them to the bulletin board in the kitchen where they has previous only kept their calendar and shopping list. At least one of the pictures he took to carrying in his wallet. (His own dad had done the same with _his_ picture.) After work, instead of kissing Karkat and just tossing a friendly “hi there!” to Shakti if she was around, John would...well, still kiss Karkat, but after that, he’d make a point to look for Shakti all around the apartment until he found her. He’d then sink to his knees for a cuddle or pick her up for a hug or settle in to play whatever game she was playing; on the nights where he was home by a reasonable time, he would sometimes spend hours setting up block towers at Shakti’s imperious squeak so that she could charge into them and knock them down, or playing silly games of keep away.

Shakti blossomed under the attention. Within days, she found the rest of her voice and energy (often to her caretakers’ dismay) and began acting like the typical grub her age - that is to say, she was loud, she was rambunctious, and she got into absolutely everything. John was overjoyed at her recovery, even if he did spend three separate nights installing extra-strength childproof locks on all the cabinets. Karkat bemoaned the loss of his relatively quiet days (and he did spend a good hour or two every day keeping Shakti out of things she shouldn’t be in these days) but overall, he didn’t complain more than was usual for him.

He did, however, find John’s newfound interest in playing and generally interacting with Shakti to be mystifying, to say the least. He joined in their games once or twice at John’s insistence, but he didn’t really understand why John was so enthusiastic about it all of the sudden. Unlike John, who was human and therefore placed great cultural importance on the idea and role of parenthood, Karkat was a troll and therefore did not have any cultural background for being the caretaker of a grub or small child. That sort of thing only happened when a troll was in a human-style relationship with a human and the cross-species couple decided to adopt; such instances were fairly rare, and often thought a little bizarre by other trolls. Karkat still cared about Shakti immensely, of course, even if he’d deny it, but it was the same sort of responsibility he felt for everyone who could presumably be called “his”. Trolls did not naturally care for their own offspring; as such, trolls were creatures with very few natural instincts concerning parenthood.

This is not, of course, to say that they did not have any.

When Shakti had arrived to the Egbert-Vantas residence, she had been two months old and riding a very elegant sine wave along the edge of starvation. By the time she was five months old, Shakti had grown three inches and ten pounds, and was as happy and unruly a grub as one could ask for. Unfortunately, as she gained in size and weight, Shakti often gained the ability to get into a variety of new places. (And she wasn’t short of the will to get into them.) Even more unfortunately, she tended to gain these abilities at a rapid pace, and the places she could access (and which she shouldn’t) opened up faster than John and Karkat could anticipate and seal them up.

Additionally, as with most grubs, Shakti had a voracious appetite, and would eat just about anything she could get her tiny, claw-like legs on. Whether or not the item she found was actually edible was another matter entirely.

It was the disastrous combination of these two factors which led Karkat Vantas, one blustery December day, to look up from his writing and realize that he had neither heard nor seen any sign of Shakti in well over two hours. Though a few months ago, this would not have been cause for concern, Karkat paused his typing to listen for the sound of scurrying grub legs or squeaking. He heard nothing but the usual sounds of an empty house. Worried that she might have gotten stuck somewhere he couldn’t hear, Karkat set down his laptop and got to his feet to search for the grub. He didn’t have to look very far. When he entered the kitchen, he found the refrigerator door open, the former contents of the fridge scattered across the floor, and Shakti lying on the floor in the middle of it, looking patently miserable as she vomited.

Karkat, understandably, flipped his shit.

By the time Karkat had gotten Shakti’s dog crate, called ahead to the local emergency clinic, and gotten Shakti out the door, she had vomited twice more and was now whining quietly and looking especially forlorn. John had the car - a fact whose revelation sent Karkat into a second fit of panic-fueled obscenity - which forced Karkat to run down the bus and take that to the clinic instead. (He still had the presence of mind, luckily, not to try to walk the required three miles.) He spent the entire trip in panicky fury, snapping at the other passengers and trying to make the bus move faster with sheer force of will. (Luckily, sheer force of will was not necessarily required, though if it had been his surely would have been enough, because as it turned out, when you told the bus driver that he needed to “haul fucking ass or so help me _this_ thing,” shoving the cage into his face, “is going to _still be on your bus_ when it starts throwing up again”, he did tend to drive faster.)

The clinic was almost empty when he arrived, which was good, because it meant Karkat only had to wait maybe five minutes before a nurse opened the door and asked for “Vantas?” (It still felt like too fucking long.) After that, it was a whirlwind of nurses and doctors, asking him what was in the fridge, what she might have eaten, how old was she, had she been ill previously to this effect, if she had any known allergies, if she might have eaten anything else, and then muttering to each other about rehydration and antibiotics where they thought he couldn’t hear. John arrived after a few hours, but by then, they’d sent Karkat back to agonize helplessly in the waiting room, so there was nothing either of them could do but wait.

“I should have kept a closer eye on her,” Karkat kept muttering under his breath, “I am a shitty, loathsome worm, a failure of a fucking excuse for a guardian, and I _should have been watching her_ -”

“It’s okay,” John kept saying in reply, “It wasn’t your fault, she’s going to be okay.” He didn’t sound quite as sure as he might have wanted to.

After about an hour or so, a doctor emerged and told them that Shakti was fine, but she had fairly severe food poisoning, which meant she was feverish and dehydrated from the vomiting, which meant she had an IV. Food poisoning wasn’t normally deadly, but the very young were often the exception to that sort of rule. Because of this, the doctor believed that Shakti would best be kept in overnight observation at the clinic itself. Someone would be with her all night, she would be in safe hands, and it was probably best if the two of them head home, get a good night’s rest, and come back in the morning. Karkat was so furiously angry that he nearly started a shouting match right there in the lobby (and it wasn’t _completely_ empty), but John’s fingers stabbing into his arm gave him the presence of mind to contain his furious arguments to whispering. The doctor apologized, but said that they really didn’t have the space for them to stay, and honestly, she’d be fine, they could come back first thing in the morning to see her, it would be fine.

In the end, they had no choice. It was leave or camp out in the lobby.

The house felt empty when they returned. They cleaned up the mess in the kitchen, taking careful note of everything that was eaten or missing, in absolute silence. John was grim and worried, his mind filled with visions of his crazy, playful little girl being still and sick, while Karkat sunk deeper and deeper into guilt and self-loathing with every passing moment, trying his hardest not to think of how scared or in pain or alone Shakti was right now and failing utterly. Dinner that night was very, very quiet.

The next morning, Karkat dropped John off at his first lesson of the day (he hadn’t wanted to go, but the clinic visit was expensive and they needed to start working up the money to pay it off as soon as possible) and drove down to the clinic half an hour later to pick up Shakti. In the passenger seat, he brought with him the pale blue blanket that Shakti had had since the caverns, which she slept with every night in her nest. He couldn’t say why he’d brought it, but that didn’t stop him from taking it with him into the clinic. The nurse on duty (not even a doctor, fuck them, fuck their “safe hands,” they should have _been there_ ) told him that Shakti was fine, a little weak and a little dehydrated, but nothing that couldn’t be fixed with some rest and plenty of fluids. Karkat received the instructions numbly, making sure he had them memorized, then let them lead him back into the clinic to the room where Shakti was.

Lying there in one of the few cribs the clinic kept around, she looked very small and very tired and very like the first time he ever saw her, but she still had the energy to perk up and give a shaky chirp when she saw him. (Karkat almost thought he felt his heart shatter at that. Maybe it was the guilt.) The nurse said that Shakti could be officially released as soon as Karkat signed a few papers - all of them bills to pay, which she had handily brought with her, of fucking course - and that the two of them could leave at any time once that was done. Too tired to bitch, Karkat filled out the forms with a minimum of grumbling.

“I don’t know if we have a spare baby carrier around, but I’m sure we have something you can use,” the nurse rambled. Karkat found out he still had a spark of fury left in him, after all.

“I can _carry_ my own goddamn _daughter_ , lady,” Karkat snarled, digging his claws in the palms of his hands. And then, not stopping to think about what he’d just said (or why he’d just said it), Karkat leaned over the bed and...proceeded to do just that.

He thought it was bizarre, how the oddest little details could make his heart hurt, like the way Shakti’s eyes lit up when she realized what he was doing, or the way she started squeaking and waving her legs like she could magically make him pick her up faster, or how, when he straightened up, she buried her face in his shoulder and started purring like a tiny engine. When he offered her the blanket with the hand not occupied in holding her, she mewled with glee and started wiggling around until he gave in and wrapped it over and around her. It was insane, how something like that could put a warm glow in his chest and make him feel like his heart was breaking, all at once.

And just like that, he was carrying Shakti out of the clinic to go home.

(His daughter.)

(Yeah, that was worth a freak out or five, later.)

The mechanics of driving with a twenty five pound grub in his arms were a momentary stumbling block, but as it turned out, John’s lesson had ended early enough that he had taken the bus over to the clinic, and was waiting for them when they got out.

“Hey, uh...” Karkat said, after the formalities (cooing over Shakti) had been gotten out of the way, “Would you mind driving? She’s, uh, she’s latched on pretty tight.” (Liar, a voice in his head said.)

John gave him a look, but it wasn’t a bad one. “Sure thing,” he said, graciously accepting the keys Karkat was offering.

“Thanks.”

When they got home, Karkat should have put Shakti down on the bed or something and gone to write his next article. John should have started getting his stuff ready for his next piano lesson. That was not what either of them did. Instead, by silent, mutual agreement Karkat (still holding Shakti, who had started to doze) and John both headed for the couch the minute they were through the door, where they collapsed together like their knees were cut out from under them. After a minute, Karkat summoned up the will to curl to the side until his head was resting on John’s shoulder and his bent legs across John’s lap, and lowered Shakti, still wrapped in her blanket, down into the hollow space between the two of them. A moment later, he felt the press of John’s lips against his temple; when Shakti yawned squeakily and looked up at them with big, sleepy eyes, he felt it when John smiled.

“And the doctor’s said she’ll be just fine?” John murmured into Karkat’s hair. Karkat nodded. Somehow, his fingers had ended up running through Shakti’s hair in a repetitive, soothing motion. Huh. Well, she seemed to like it. Why not. It had nothing to do with how his hand shook, just slightly, between when he lifted it up and set it back down on her head.

“Just fine,” Karkat repeated dully, “Just fucking fine.”

John snorted faintly. “No swearing in front of Shakti.”

Karkat rolled his eyes, but said nothing. A moment later, John brought his hand up and they laced their fingers together, resting both on Shakti as she curled up against them and appeared to fall asleep. Karkat felt the other hand settle on the back of his neck in a gesture of comfort. The silence became comfortable.

Except for the part where it wasn’t truly silence.

After some time, Karkat because aware of a slight vibration under his hand where it rested on Shakti’s back. When he listened, he heard a faint buzzing noise, low enough that it was more felt than heard. He frowned. The noise was bizarre, but weirdly familiar at the same time. When he glanced down, he saw that Shakti was awake and staring up at him and John with a wide, slightly dazed grin.

“What’s that shit-eating grin for, you little jerk, you gave us a collective heart attack yesterday,” Karkat muttered fondly. Shakti - who obviously knew when she was being addressed - squirmed forward a little and managed to push herself up to rest her front legs on Karkat’s chest. “Yeah, you,” he said, “You little shit.” He ran his hand over her hair again. Shakti’s eyes fell closed and her grin went wide and open-mouthed. The purring kicked up a few notches, into audible range. And that was when it hit him.

“Oh,” he said, increasingly panicked, “Oh, shit. John. _John._ ”

John tensed. “What?” he said, sitting up a little. “What’s wrong?”

“ _Do you hear that?_ ” Karkat hissed. John blinked.

“The purring?”

“ _Yes_ , the purring, you _idiot_ ,” Karkat shrieked quietly. John relaxed and looked a little bewildered. “Do you know what that _means?_ ”

“Uh, I’m pretty sure that’s nothing to worry about, Karkat,” he said, “I mean, she does it all the time when I’m holding her or playing with her.” Karkat twitched helplessly. Oh, son of a bitch, humans.

“John,” Karkat said very calmly, “That’s not just one of her usual bullshit grub noises that she always makes. That is one of the very few random-ass sounds that actually means something.”

John perked up. “Oh, really? What does it mean?”

Karkat groaned and, turning his head, buried his face in John’s neck. “It means ‘lusus,’ John,” he mumbled, “It means she thinks we are her _lusus_. It’s like the troll version of baby saying ‘mama’ for the first fucking time, Shakti just fucking called me ‘Trolldad’, oh, fuck. Shit, _shit_ , fuck, John, I, I’m not a lusus, I just, what the _fuck_ -”

“Oh, geez,” John whispered, eyes wide. A smile began to grow on his face. “Karkat, this is great-”

“No it’s fucking not John!” Karkat screeched, whipping around to face John. “Trolls aren’t supposed to raise kids, _lusii_ are supposed to raise kids! We’re so in-fucking-competent we don’t even raise our own-” All the blood drained out of his face at once. “Shit - John, what if this means - John, if she imprints on us as her lusii, what if she won’t be able to imprint on a real lusus? She’s,” he swallowed deeply, “Shakti’s not supposed to stay with us forever, Kanaya’s probably out there _right now_ looking for a proper lusus for her, and if she imprints on us...”

John looked down at Shakti, who was looking up at them curiously. When she realized he was looking at her, she tilted her head to the side and trilled curiously. He’d forgotten. That she wasn’t...wasn’t really theirs. (He wasn’t the only one.) “Yeah, we’re talking about you, baby girl,” John said softly, cupping the side of her face to watch her grin and purr all over again. “Crazy silly baby girl, we’re talking about you.”

“John?” Karkat said after a moment.

John sighed. “I know,” he said. “I know. We’ll…call Kanaya. Tonight?”

Karkat was silent for moment.

“Yeah. Sure. Tonight.”

They didn’t linger very long after that. They still had jobs to do, after all. John pulled himself away to head to his next lesson after a minute; Karkat sat there, curled around Shakti, who had gone to sleep still happily purring, until he heard the car pulling away. He uncurled and lifted Shakti carefully off his lap; he had an article to write, after all. If he spent an extra minute tucking Shakti’s blanket around her and watching her smile in her sleep, well, that was no one’s fucking business but his own.

Karkat spent the rest of the day very much aware of every movement Shakti made. He couldn’t help it; everytime she so much as twitched his eyes would snap over to her like they were fucking magnetized or something, no matter how much he had thought he wasn’t paying attention. Even when she didn’t move, he couldn’t help sending her slow glances out of the corner of his eye, making sure she was still there, still breathing. Luckily for his state of mind, Shakti wasn’t going anywhere fast; she was still exhausted from the shitty adventure that was the past day or so. As with her first days in their apartment, she dozed a majority of the time, and when she wasn’t sleeping, she didn’t even leave the room.

However, any good this might have done for his mental integrity was negated by the way Karkat also found himself hyper aware of every time Shakti looked at him, made noises at him, or generally interacted with his person. Now that he was paying attention - now that he couldn’t ignore it anymore - he could see what he had missed so often before; the parallels between how Shakti treated him and John and the way he’d treated his own lusus, well over a decade ago in his memory, were obvious. That mix of adoration, fond tolerance, and imperious “feed me, meal slave”. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen this ridiculous shit before.

And complete fuckwit that he was, he’d been responding without even realizing it. Fussing over her when she was sick or tired or bored. Giving her tidbits of food whenever she made sad eyes at him. Scolding her when she got in trouble or did something dangerous like trying to climb the bookshelf, whether or not she could understand him. Shit, he’d been acting more like a lusus than some lusii did.

It didn’t exactly put him at ease, to say the least. (To say the most, he was very quietly doing a series of positively olympic-medal-winning acrobatic feats off the handle. There was no end in sight. It just kept happening.) He did not get much work done that day.

John was home at a decent hour, so they had no excuse for pushing it off or just leaving a message of some kind. Neither of them wanted to let Shakti out of their sight, either. So at about seven, they sat down on the couch, Shakti curled up across both of their laps, set the laptop down in front of them, and set Kanaya a invite to videochat. She answered within minutes.

Kanaya looked a little more tired than she had a few months ago, but she was still in possession of that jadeblood grace and poise. “Hello Karkat, John,” her mouth quirked in a faint smile, “Shakti. To what do I owe the pleasure?”

John and Karkat exchanged an uneasy look. “Well...” John started.

“Shakti lusus-purred at me,” Karkat said bluntly, “And she’s apparently been doing it to John for...months?” John nodded. “Fucking months, and the idiot just didn’t know what it meant.”

Kanaya blinked. After a thoughtful pause, she nodded slowly. “I...am not wholly surprised,” she said haltingly. “This is not something that I anticipated, necessarily, but I suppose it is not out of the question that Shakti could come to acknowledge the two of you as lusii of a sort.”

Karkat grimaced. “Kanaya, aren’t grubs supposed to, shit, imprint or something on their lusii? Like, that’s their lusus, and if that lusus - fuck, I don’t know, disappears or something - they won’t be able to connect another one?”

Kanaya blinked again, before her eyes lit up in understanding. She leaned her head against one hand and rubbed at her forehead with a faint smirk that seemed just slightly self-mocking. “Ah,” she sighed, “I see your point.” She thought for a moment, then began slowly: “Grub-lusus imprinting is not an instant connection. Rather, it is a process, taking time.” She paused. “At this moment, Shakti has only been with you for approximately three months, correct?”

“...Yeah, that’s right,” John said cautiously, once it became apparent that she expected an answer. Kanaya nodded firmly.

“Imprinting on you two as lusii, to the point where she could no longer connect with a proper lusus-” (John winced slightly; Karkat pretended not to notice. Mostly because it made him want to flinch, too.) “-would be so unlikely as to be unheard of in so short a time. Permanent imprinting,” Kanaya summarized, “would take at least thrice that.”

“Good to know,” John said weakly a moment later. Out of sight, Karkat slipped his hand into John’s and squeezed lightly.

“Kanaya, how much godforsaken time does it take to find one shitty matching lusus?” Karkat grumbled. Kanaya frowned.

“So far, I have contacted five of the eighteen North American chapters which I have been advised might contain a satisfactory lusus,” she said primly. John got the feeling they’d offended her work ethic or something. “None of those five have experienced that specific variant of lusus recently enough to have one ready, but each assured me that mutants of that nature are in fact as common as I was originally told, if not more so. My final examinations as an Auxiliatrix are coming up, so it may take more time than I thought, but I would not imagine more than another six months. At worst the correct lusus will be at the last one that I contact; at best, it will be at the next one, and Shakti will have a proper home inside of a week.”

This time, Karkat squeezed John’s hand tightly, before he (either of them) could visibly wince.

“In any case, I am sure,” Kanaya finished, “that Shakti will be fine.”

They were silent for a while. Longer than they should have been. She had to have noticed.

“Thanks, Kanaya,” John said eventually, “That’s good to hear.”

“I am glad that I could assuage your concerns, John,” Kanaya replied easily. Something in the wry twist of her mouth made it clear that she knew the inaccuracy in that statement and in how they really felt, but out of some form of kindness, she said nothing. (Honestly, sometimes Karkat felt he really could go pale for her again. (Then he remembered every reason it didn’t work out and came to his senses, but that was beside the point.)) “May I bid you a good night?”

“Sure thing,” John said, smiling, “Good night, Kanaya.”

“Night, Kanaya,” Karkat growled a second later. She dipped her head in a small bow.

“Good night,” she said. Then she reached forward for something they couldn’t see, there was a click, and the chat window disconnected with a beep.

The mechanical sound managed to startle Shakti awake; she had slept through the entire conversation previous. She jumped slightly, drawing the attention of John and Karkat, and swung her head from side to side looking with sleepy, bewildered eyes for whatever it was that had startled her. John, unable to help himself, reached out and stroked his hand over her hair and down her back. Shakti - who had obviously forgotten who and what she fell asleep on - jumped again and turned her face up towards the two adults. It took a moment for her eyes to focus, but the minute she recognized them was obvious. Her face broke out into a drowsy, happy grin and she started purring again.

That night, they moved Shakti’s nest into their room. (And though they never said it aloud, they firmly resolved not to talk about lusii or parenthood or the future again. Out of sight, out of mind, after all.) (They only wished.)

The lusus which Kanaya was looking for was not found at the next chapter of Auxiliatrices, or the next one, or the next one. The months in between each failure were some of the happiest (and most thoroughly insane) to take place to date in the lives of all three residents of that little apartment in Seattle. The stories that came out of that time period would, years later, become fundamental family classics, the tellings of which were accompanied by rolled eyes, fond smiles, and (in those new to this particular continuity) a hearty amount of utter disbelief. That was to be expected, of course. The sheer ridiculousness of John and Karkat’s Early Adventures in Parenting (TM) was underestimated only at the listener’s peril.

Up until about Shakti’s sixth month birthday (such as it was), Shakti lead an existence whose outer limits were the boundaries of the apartment. However, when Shakti turned six months old, John (and, to a lesser extent, Karkat) decided that a perfect present for the occasion would be to take Shakti on her first real exploratory voyage into the outside world. They decided to take her to a local park which had a small playground much loved by the local children and much recommended by the local parents. This went decently well, and John and Karkat felt comfortable relaxing on a bench and getting to know some of the other parents, up until the point when a loud wail went up from the other side of the playground.

When all was said and done, it turned out that Shakti, having enjoyed the playground thoroughly and then gotten tired, had decided to find somewhere in the playground to take a nap. She’d chosen the middle of the slide. Thus, when another child - this one human - came along wanting to go down the slide, Shakti had hissed at him ferociously. This - plus the desire to go down the slide - had accumulated a crowd of children, who then started to dare one another to be the one to go down and try to remove the grub from the slide. One brave boy (well, brave and/or especially weak to peer pressure) had been the one to try; he’d moved around to the side of the slide, reached over the brim of it, and tried to pick Shakti up with his bare hands. And of course, she’d decided that the obvious solution to this was to bite him.

Karkat and John apologized profusely to the mother, left the playground, and resolved to never let Shakti out of the apartment ever again.

This did not help. Only two weeks later, their across-the-hall neighbor brought home a small, yappy dog - his girlfriend’s, which he was supposed to take care of for the next week. Unfortunately for everyone involved (which included John, Karkat, the across-the-hall neighbor, the neighbors on either side, the residents of the entire floor, residents of the surrounding floors, and anyone who came within earshot), Shakti took something of a dislike to the dog. Or rather, she took a very intense liking to the yapping - enough so that she decided to imitate it every time the dog barked. This, of course, made the dog think there was another dog living across the hall, which drove the poor thing (or the hellish thing, depending on who was telling the story) absolutely frantic. Which meant that it yapped more. Which meant that Shakti yapped back even more. Which meant that for almost three days straight, the beleaguered residents of the third floor were subject to the non-stop sound of a small dog and a small grub yapping at each other through their apartment doors. Loudly. And nigh constantly. The infrequent, half-hour long breaks, during which Shakti and the dog ate and/or slept, were not enough to salvage any form of sanity. The sheer irregularity actually made it worse.

The torment was ended when Across-the-hall Neighbor finally gave in and returned the dog to his girlfriend’s custody four days early, but the damage was already done. John and Karkat realized that no matter where Shakti was, she would find some way to get into trouble, cause chaos, or otherwise raise hell, so she might as well be doing it outside their home as well as inside it.

As far as capacities for destruction and outright mayhem were concerned, Shakti’s was almost unmatched. There was certainly an element of mere personality in it - once healthy, Shakti became a dangerous combination of exceedingly curious, stubborn, and completely lacking in common sense - but any damage or chaos she might have caused alone was only compounded by something that, honestly, John and Karkat really should have seen coming.

(I mean, Kanaya did _tell_ them. She stands by her claim that it’s not her fault they forgot.)

Karkat had always had a fondness of chocolate, and the best chocolate around could be found in the form of a local store’s renowned triple chocolate truffles. As a chocolate lover, Karkat kept at all times a secret stash of these truffles - which he regularly restocked -at the very back on the very top shelf of the highest cabinet in the kitchen. (It wasn’t very secret, but that was beside the point.) He had a habit, too, of taking down a single truffle from the stash around noon and leaning against the kitchen counter to eat it. One of these times, Shakti wandered into the kitchen while he was getting down the truffle (a process which included standing on the counter and sticking one’s entire arm to the shoulder into the cabinet) and stopped her meandering to stare at him in frank confusion.

“Yeah, yeah, kid, it’s worth it,” Karkat had said, climbing down with his prize in hand. Shakti continued to stare as he unwrapped it, and he paused to give her a thoughtful look. “...why the fuck not,” he said. “It’s not like it’ll hurt you.” And he broke off a small piece of truffle, reached down, and placed it in front of Shakti. Shakti, after some extremely skeptical sniffing, ate the chocolate bit, paused, nodded a little, and wandered out of the room completely without incident.

Two days later, Karkat yelled at John from the kitchen, “John, you ass, have you been eating my truffles? They’re fucking gone, and I know I had three left!”

And so began the Mystery of the Disappearing Truffles.

For a full week, John and Karkat were at a complete loss to explain why and how the truffles kept disappearing from the top cabinet. Every single time, Karkat went to the store to get more, and every single time, they were gone by within a few days. In the end, they just decided to set up a camera and film what happened, to see if they would figure it out. The morning after, they watched via film as Shakti trotted into the kitchen about one o’clock in the morning, looked very intently at the cabinet, which opened on its own, and then levitated up to the shelf and crawled in. After about twenty minutes, she trotted out again, paused a moment, then leaped out (Karkat felt his heart stop a moment), and floated gently to the floor again, before trotting off again, pretty as you please.

“...fucking hell,” Karkat groaned after a second, “Kanaya _said_ she had telekinesis.”

"...how the hell did we forget _that?_ "

And that's how John and Karkat (sort of) found out (for the second time) that Shakti was telekinetic.

If they thought they were unprepared to be parents, lusii, caretakers, whatever the hell they were to a troll grub, it was nothing compared to how _completely_ unprepared they were to deal with the shenanigans that came with being parents (lusii, you get the drift) to a _psychic_ troll grub. Like that one time when they spent three hours running around the apartment, freaking out because they could hear Shakti squeaking and couldn’t find her. As it turned out, the reason they couldn’t find her was because they were looking in all the places one would logically find a grub - the ground the couch, behind the couch, under the couch, under the bed, the bookshelf, and a host of similar locations - instead of looking in the one place one would logically not find a grub (which was of course where she was) and which could only be achieved through the gratuitous and semi-accidental application of telekinesis - the ceiling. And then, of course, they had to figure out how to get her down.

Or, there was the time she threw a tantrum because she couldn’t follow John out to one of his lessons, and made everything in the room that was under twenty pounds explode outward in every direction. That was fun. (Karkat usually tacked a few extra adjectives on there, and so did John(the adjectives were usually remarkably similar), but that was the general gist of it.) Or there was the time they had to call the fire department after she got stuck in a tree next to their apartment building, because there was a bird out the window and she decided to catch it, and then couldn’t get down. That one wasn’t especially a telekinetics incident, except for the part where she opened the window with them.

John and Karkat’s first experience with parenting was _not_ set to the easiest difficulty level.

There were plenty of incidents that didn’t involve psychic abilities, as well. They discovered that of all things, Shakti did understand the concept of revenge, and was fond of it; when she was angry with you, she would chew through your shoelaces and/or abandoned computer charger chords. Groceries left unattended on the counter were subject to investigation, which meant climbing inside the large brown bags; however, though she could get into the bags, she would always end up getting wedged in there somehow, and would sit there squeaking indignantly until someone came and fished her out. Shakti did this every single time, and despite the other obvious signs of her intelligence, she never seemed to learn, because a few days later, she would always do it again. She may have hated storms (and they saw a lot of storms in Seattle) but aside from that, Shakti was the kind of fearless that either led one to do great things or, if you were about thirty pounds and the size of a small dog, drove one’s parents to distraction. One of the best things to ever happen to her, by the tiny grub’s apparent estimation, was the first scary movie she ever saw. When they choose the movie, Karkat was hesitant, complaining to John that “what if it freaks her the fuck out? She could get fucking trauma or something.” By the end of the night, John was green with nausea where he wasn’t pale with fear (the special effects team had gone a little overboard with the blood), Karkat was hiding behind John, both were one more jump-scare away from giving up and hiding in the bedroom, and Shakti was rapt and chittering with delight. From then on, whenever John or Karkat went to put in a movie, she would get frantically excited up until the movie started and it became clear that it wasn’t a horror movie, at which point she would sulk for hours.

If this was the only consequence of Shakti’s fearlessness, that would have been fine. However, curiosity plus fearlessness, plus adventurousness, plus a good helping of stubborn sneakiness had an annoying tendency to equal trouble and chaos of the highest caliber. Given that Karkat and John had mostly given up trying to contain Shakti to their apartment, these factors all combined in a comedic fashion known to their friends via an extensive list of locations titled “Where Did John and Karkat Lose Her This Time?” And that about summed it up. The first time was the mall, and luckily, they found her after only five minutes, trying to sneak into one of the stores in the food court. No one was hurt, nothing was damaged, chaos was minimal, no police were involved, and all in all, it was not much of an incident. They recovered from their heart attacks, hugged Shakti (who was more than a little confused) very tightly, and swore it would never happen again. The second time they lost Shakti, they were on the bus, and only discovered she was missing when a woman in the back who, like most, had never seen a troll grub before, shrieked and tried to hit Shakti with her purse. Karkat would have taken the poor lady right the fuck out if John hadn’t grabbed him in time. They had some trouble there, but all in all, it came to nothing.

The third time - known to all and sundry as “The Cantaloupe Incident” - more than made up for it.

It was a Friday, and John had discovered that they were out of basically everything food related, so he had dragged Karkat off to a small local supermarket to fix it. This, of course, had meant that Shakti had to come as well. (The last time they’d left her at home was...something they never wanted to repeat, let’s say that.) They got a cart with a kid seat in it, stuck her in there, and for almost ten minutes she seemed content to sit there and be fascinated by everything. Then they turned back around after bickering momentarily over which container of strawberries to get, and found themselves missing exactly one troll grub. Not a moment later, Karkat’s profuse swearing was drowned out by an announcement over the store’s intercom.

“Clean-up in aisle three.” John and Karkat exchanged looks and said, in perfect unison: “Shakti.” By the time they got to aisle three, however, they found most of the cereal boxes - some of them opened by what looked like tiny teeth marks - all over the floor, and no Shakti. The next announcement was “Clean-up in the dairy aisle,” and sounded just slightly more bewildered than the previous one. Twelve announcements, half an hour, the produce section, the dairy aisle, the frozen foods area, and the snack food aisle later, John and Karkat found Shakti sitting peacefully in the middle in the giant bin of cantaloupes, contentedly gnawing on a rind and looking completely innocent and unaware of why they were all freaking out. Karkat inhaled deeply, and probably would have spent another half an hour scolding the grub with every obscenity he knew, but as it turned out, sometime after the fourth announcement, the store employees had formed a hunting party of sorts, who had also been tracking Shakti’s trail of chaos, and who arrived a mere few seconds after John and Karkat did. John grabbed Shakti, looped his arm through Karkat’s, and made a break for it.

(Later, they sent the store an anonymous check that more than paid for any and all damages, and found somewhere else to buy their groceries.)

There were so many things that happened in that period of time, so many other incidents that they would look back at and smile. Karkat had about five dozen pictures of the time when Shakti discovered that if she ran at a bunch of pigeons, they would scatter, and spent three hours playing “Bowling for Pigeons” using herself as the small, excitable bowling ball. After a few major incidents caused by Shakti escaping them in public, they decided to find a solution, which resulted in the Epic Tale of the Leash. (It did work, so there was that. Karkat stood by his choices.)

Life, however, did not go away just because they wanted it to. (They should have known better than to pretend it would, anyway.)

When Shakti was almost a year and a half old, several months over the projected deadline of six months, Kanaya contacted them. It was a phone call, so they didn’t get to see her face, but her voice more than communicated her exhaustion - and her heartbreak.

“Karkat...” she said, “John. I’m sorry. I have been to every chapter on my list, and contacted a few dozen others in my search, and I fear it is official. There is not a single lusus of a matching variety to Shakti to be found.”

“I...what does this mean?” John had asked. (Karkat couldn’t speak past the lump in his throat.)

Kanaya had sighed, then. “We are somewhat lucky, in that respect. Once I discovered that a lusus was not an option, I decided to speak to some of the elder Auxiliatrices again. While rare, there are a few foster houses and adoption agencies which cater to young trolls who have lost their lusii, and Shakti is now of an age where they would be willing to take her in. I have already spoken to the one in Arizona, and they said that they had enough room and would be happy to have her. They said that one of their workers could come by your apartment this Tuesday to pick her up.”

“That’s good,” John had said hoarsely. It was Sunday.

“I can not thank you enough for the patience you have shown in this,” Kanaya had said gently. “I honestly did not think that you would have to deal with this so long.”

“And you fucking think we did?” Karkat snapped. “What time is the agency minion showing up?”

“Mid-morning I believe,” Kanaya said calmly.

“Fine. Fucking great,” Karkat growled. “See you later, Maryam.” And he ended the call so fiercely that the phone casing creaked under the stress.

They were silent for a while, until Shakti trotted into the room and gave them a curious look. John leaned forward and scooped her up, pulling her close. She squirmed and chirped a complaint for a moment, frowning up at John, then settled down and began to purr into his shoulder. She had grown so much since she first arrived over a year ago; she was almost twice as big now, large enough that she took up the entirety of John’s lap

“Yeah,” John murmured. “That’s my sweet girl. That’s our sweet baby girl.”

The morning after next, the woman who showed up at their door was human and poker-faced; she said few words and stood outside the door while Karkat and John rounded up Shakti and her things, packed them away, and got her into the old dog crate (they hadn’t used it in months), and handed her off. The woman took it with a murmured thank you, and was gone.

And the house was silent.

John left, and went to work. Karkat revised his article, written the previous day, and completed and sent it out in record time. It was remarkable, how much one could concentrate on and get done without the distractions of a small, smiling grub asking one for food or play or cuddles. Looking up at you with adoration, lusus-purring as she curled into your side for attention. It was amazing.

(No. No, it wasn’t amazing, it _hurt_.)

After some time, John returned home. They ate. Silent, unspeaking, they went to bed, and slept poorly. That was their day. It was also the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that.

The fifth evening, Karkat and John, by silent agreement, sat side by side on the couch, right in the same place where they had sat to speak to Kanaya that first time Karkat had heard Shakti purr. Where they’d held Shakti after her food poisoning. Where John had cuddled Shakti as she cried from that first storm. Where Karkat had watched Shakti wake for the first time.

They did not speak. Not for a long time. One does not need to, when sharing in heartbreak.

“I told you we should have just gotten that German Shepherd puppy,” Karkat rasped defeatedly. He was collapsed against the couch with his head lolling against the back of it, looking like nothing so much as a puppet with cut strings. John hunched forward, elbows on his knees and head in his hands; he snorted, amused in the bleak, morbid way where in light of what has happened, all the pain and loss, anything looks a little funny.

(In the English language, we have a word for a child made bereft of their parents: orphan. It is the cruelest sin that we do not have a word for the reverse: parents made bereft of their child. Both, after all, are equally devastating.)

It began the day they went to Fresno. It could have ended here. There, in that moment, it seemed that the light and color had gone out of their lives. They had never expected Shakti to be their daughter, never expected her in the first place, but she’d made a place in their lives, and she’d left a hole behind.

Karkat realized something.

He couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of that. He- why hadn’t they thought of that? It wouldn’t be easy, but honestly, like it would be any different. It might take a while to send through, but they had all the time in the world for this.

He sat up. He swore under his breath, more in wry amusement and the adrenaline rush of new hope than anything. “We’re idiots, aren't we.” It wasn't a question.

John raised his head just a little and looked at him oddly. “..what?”

Karkat grinned.

 

.

.

.

 

The interview rooms at the Second Hope Home for Orphaned Trolls were perpetually stuffy and uncomfortable, no matter the time of year or day, and though the agency’s secretary enjoyed her job well enough, that little detail was always enough to make her loathe this part of it. Luckily, she only had one interview today, even if she would have prefered none: a young cross-species couple, somewhere in their twenties, looking to adopt. They’d been prompt with their job and income credentials, and had so far answered the checklist of questions readily and politely. The secretary tugged subtly at her collar as she finished off the list.

“...and why did you two decided you wanted a child?”

The human half of the couple - a good looking man, with brilliant blue eyes - traded a glance with his partner, then smiled brightly. “We felt that we were finally ready to be parents!” the man said cheerfully, looking entirely too chipper (the secretary thought grumpily) for the muggy heat of the room.

“And are you prepared to be the parents of one of our children?” the secretary droned, thanking every power she knew that they’d reached the last one.

She didn’t expect the dour-looking troll, who’d been silent for most of the interview and looked as patently miserable in the heat as the secretary felt, to suddenly grin. “Yeah,” he said, “Don’t worry. We’re pretty d- pretty well prepared.”

The secretary paused, then decided it wasn’t worth the effort to investigate that just yet. “Alright, then!” she said, standing up, “In that case, would you like to go meet the kids now?”

“Absolutely!” the cheerful human man said, standing with her.

The secretary lead them out of the interview room (with a brief sigh of relief, which she shared with the troll) and down the hall. The playroom was chaos incarnate - almost three dozen young trolls engaged in various activities, from playing with blocks to chasing each other around and screeching. Instantly, the human man waded into the crowd with a bright grin. The troll man hung back, turning to the secretary.

“Thank you,” he said, obviously a little embarrassed. It faded, however, in light of the look in his mutant-red eyes when he looked at his partner. The man had looked almost sullen earlier, but now, the secretary was surprised to discover how the warmth on his face transformed him. It gave him a sort of grumpy charisma, which even she could feel the pull of.

“No problem,” she said, a little awed. The troll smiled, a little uneasily, like he didn’t do it often, and went after his boyfriend.

The two men wandered through the crowd. When children spoke to them, they spoke back, but neither of them approached a child on their own. Instead, they kept looking around the room, like they were looking for something or someone in particular. Neither of them seemed to find it. Finally, the troll knelt and spoke to one of the older children who acted as a caretaker to the rest, holding a quick, quiet conversation. The child nodded once, twice, then pointed to a secluded corner of the room, before going about their business once more. The troll stood and made his way carefully back to the area indicated, which housed a very young troll who sat by herself, quietly playing with some worn blocks. The man, who had been looking elsewhere, glanced over and started to follow at a gesture from the troll. That child, huh. The secretary remembered the girl in question. She’d pupated just last month, not long after her arrival, and was still very solemn and shy around people, the way the recently orphaned always were. A sweet girl.

The troll went and knelt a few feet away from the girl, reaching out to touch her lightly on the shoulder. The girl tilted her head up to look at the adult through her untidy mop of hair, and the adult froze. The secretary almost groaned in dismay. Surely the troll - a mutant himself, after all - knew better than to reject a child just on her mutation? The girl couldn’t help having three eyes, after all, and the secretary thought the overall effect was rather charming. But instead of grimacing or moving away, as she’d expected, the troll relaxed and held out his hand.

“Hey baby girl,” he said softly, “Ready to go home?”

And then the little cerulean girl, who’d been nothing but quiet and expressionless the entire time she’d been at the home, smiled as brilliantly as the sun.

“Papa!”

And _launched_ herself into her fathers’ arms.


End file.
